


specters in broad daylight

by mikkary



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Canon-Typical Violence, Found Family, Gen, Hallucinations, Minor Character Death, POV First Person, Sibling Bonding, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28133790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkary/pseuds/mikkary
Summary: In the unreal city of Mélusine, professional data thief Mildmay Foxe has a job that's too big for him and a ghost that won't leave him alone. It's hard to tell whether he's losing his nerve or his mind.
Relationships: Mildmay Foxe & Felix Harrowgate
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	specters in broad daylight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GlassRain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassRain/gifts).



> See the end of the fic for content warnings.

_Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,  
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!_

Teeming city, city full of dreams,  
Where specters in broad daylight cling to passers by!

– Charles Baudelaire, “Les sept vieillards”

*

The ghost showed up while I was jiggering the keypad lock to von Heber’s server room, which is why at first I thought it was some kind of flash security tool, a reddish projection on my AR rig to read me my rights before the whole system shut down on top of me. I dropped my tools and put my hands up just in case, but then I realized the ghost wasn’t looking at me. It was staring at the door in concentration.

I shifted the rig away from my face just a little, looking at the space where the ghost had shown up in AR. Nothing.

I put the rig back on. The ghost came back.

It was indistinct, fuzzy around the edges, like it had pushed itself here through a bad connection or wasn’t entirely sure what it wanted to be or both. I’d never seen a ghost before but I knew a few folks who had, and a few more who made it their business to get rid of them. The ‘net is full of ghosts.

My rig was pre-owned, of course, but I’m pretty sure none of its owners had been this guy – tall, slim, with chopped up red hair and a face that looked oddly familiar from a couple angles. I didn’t realize how distracted I’d gotten until the ghost straightened up and looked at me.

There was some kind of spooky glitch with its eyes. One was normal-looking, showing up yellow in the glow of the AR display. The other was wide and not like an eye at all, seeing as it was filled with static that I somehow knew, if I zoomed in, would resolve into lines and lines of binary code, unreadable strings of ones and zeroes that filled up this ghost and made it real.

A line of characters scrolled across the side of my AR display, looking like they were floating out of the ghost's fucked up eye. They flickered from alphabet to alphabet until they arranged themselves into something I could read.

_This is a trap._

“What the fuck?” I said out loud, barely breathing out the word. If the ghost was hooked into my AR feed, it would pick up the question from the tiny subvocal mic nestled against my throat.

 _A trap_ , the ghost wrote again, and gave me a withering look as if I’d been asking what he’d meant rather than questioning the entire messed up situation.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I heard that sometimes ghosts would manifest out of your own data, that glitchy AR programs would cobble together projections based on your own captured image, your own thoughts and fears. Hell, some people even used them as oracles.

Maybe that’s why the ghost looked so familiar. Or maybe this was the first (second, third) stage of delirium, and there wasn’t a ghost at all, and I was just talking to myself.

I picked up my tools and returned to the keypad, ignoring the ghost and the text scrolling across my AR display: _Why are you doing this?_

Because Ginevra’s dead, I thought. Because I got to do one more job before I can lay low. Because it’d seemed easy.

I didn’t say it out loud, though, and the ghost was gone by the time I opened the door and the alarms started to blare.

*

When they finally brought me to him, after roughing me up and confiscating my rig and doing all the other stuff goons do when they’re supposed to scare you but they ain’t supposed to kill you, Mavortian von Heber was different to how I expected.

Not that I knew much about him; I’d spent more time figuring things out about his servers than I had thinking about the man himself. Still, though, I hadn’t expected to be greeted all friendly-like by the broker I’d just tried to rob.

“Welcome. You’re exactly what I needed.” He was sitting on a kind of high up chair with wires and tubes crawling up all over his withered body like vines, and his eyes weren’t quite focused on me. I imagined what I’d see if I had my AR rig on – glowing virtual displays showing my vitals, my identification (I think I was Umberto tonight, but he could probably see through that one if he tried), a thousand other little bits of data that brokers could take in at a glance.

His eyes flicked up and then to the side, a dismissive gesture. I glanced over my shoulder, but the head goon, a burly blond guy with braided mustaches, didn’t move. I looked back at Mavortian von Heber, who blinked a few times like he was tapping out a code, and then said, “I suppose you’re wondering how we caught you.”

I hadn’t been, actually. I’d figured it’d been the kind of bad luck that comes with making a stupid decision on too much grief and too little sleep.

“I called you, you see.” His face grew more animated. “I have been developing a divinatory algorithm that works from the base of a quantum random number generator. I have been using it to perform a calling for the past three days. And, well, here you are.” His lips quirked upward in a smile that I already disliked.

I glanced back at the goon. He didn’t give me no hints, just stared back with a stony expression. Did he know his boss was off his head? I guess it didn’t matter to him, so long as he got paid. I looked back at von Heber. I hadn’t really understood what he meant – I’m not a coder, and the shit he was talking about sounded way beyond the small fry stuff they do in Mélusine. It sounded like Mirador business.

Except von Heber clearly wasn’t connected to the Mirador – his hands weren’t all fucked up with augmentations, which is how they mark their specialists – and the Mirador has a tight hold on quantum processors, so I at least knew that I was way out of my depth.

“Whatever you’re gonna do to me, just get it over with,” I said. My voice came out an ugly croak.

“Hm.” If Mavortian could have shrugged, he would have. “What I am going to do with you, Mildmay Foxe, is offer you a job.”

And just like that, I knew the game was up. If he’d gotten access to my real name – the infamous name – he knew enough to get me in real hot water with Mirador cybersecurity. Between that and my non-regulation AR rig that his goon-in-chief had confiscated, von Heber knew he had me over a barrel. Even the shittiest gambler wouldn’t have bet on the odds I could refuse this job and get out of here in one piece.

“What’s the job?” I said, my voice not coming out any nicer even though my throat was getting less rusty.

Von Heber’s lips quirked in that little smile again. “Find the man who broke the Virtu. Bring me Felix Harrowgate.”

*

This is probably a good time for a little explanation, seeing as how I don’t know whether you know anything about Mélusine or the Mirador or the Virtu. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t – and that’s a good thing. It’s all nasty business. Business that I’d been out of for years. Business that Mavortian von Heber was dragging me back into.

Mélusine ain’t real. That’s the first thing you have to know for the telling of this story. Or – it _is_ real, but not in the way where you can touch it or eat it or breathe it. It’s all around us, but you can’t get there unless you’ve got the proper equipment, and even then you can only get there in your head. In parts of your head, anyway, the ones that are connected to augments and VR-space and hooked up to the ‘net.

It’s an “informational superstructure created by the attempt to organize years of data accretion into a coherent, navigable whole,” my old friend Zephyr Wolsey said one time, and once I was clear on what superstructure meant, I thought it was as good an explanation as any. Basically, these layers and layers of code got built up over time, and when they got too big to organize in the old ways, with databases and such, they got slapped onto a map so that humans could still find their way around. More or less. The word _Mélusine_ is a prettied up name they made out of some acronym that nobody remembers anymore – Mapped Electronic something or other. It got less and less important as Mélusine expanded, spilled out over its boundaries as code piled on code, as users flooded in, as it outgrew

 _Mapped ELectronic USer INterface Experience_. _That’s what it stands for. Mélusine_.

Hey. This is my story.

Anyway, Mélusine ain’t real enough to touch but it _is_ real enough that you can walk through its streets and meet people there, go into simulated buildings like von Heber’s broker shop, though I wasn’t sure anymore how much of that was just a front. And those buildings are connected through the ‘net to places in meatspace like von Heber’s server room, which I’d just been caught breaking into. But in Mélusine, von Heber's broker shop is right next to a jewelry storefront run by the satellite company of a giant corporation whose servers are halfway across the world.

Towering over all of Mélusine is the Mirador, a huge spire that you can see out of the corner of your eye no matter where you go in the city. Whenever you swing your head to try and look right at it, it moves too. Kind of like a ghost. It even shows up on AR sets that aren’t jailbreaked – “liberated,” Zephyr used to say, and I liked that way of looking at it. If you’re using an official Mirador rig, that spire is always there to remind you who really owns what you’re seeing. If you select it, it actually opens their 24/7 help line, which must be cute for the flats, the ones who use the rigs to play games or talk to their friends or who step into Mélusine for a good time only and don’t care that the Mirador knows everything they’re doing.

The funny thing is, that ghost spire don’t look anything like the real Mirador headquarters. That’s a squat, ugly building that’s spread out over an office complex maybe four blocks wide – Mélusine blocks, that is, and yeah, I know it’s weird to use VR measurements for physical things, but I ain’t got anything better to compare it with. Most of the real Mirador is underground, and it’s ugly as sin.

I know because I’ve been there.

_That is where you killed Cerberus Cresset. And where you were in turn marked by Mirador security._

Yeah. Exactly. But they don’t need to know about that, because that ain’t what this story is about.

_Isn’t._

Anyway. Mirador Corp created Mélusine and tries its best to control it as well as all the specialist coders who work for it in R&D. And it does that through the Virtu, which is a quantum computer powerful enough to process all the data going through Mélusine and then some. It also powers the firewall that keeps people from getting into Mélusine or other Mirador tech and messing with it too much – rogue specialists like Zephyr can do little things like liberate a rig here and there, but the Virtu meant no one could get in and really mess around with the deep structure that kept Mélusine in place.

Except two months before Mavortian von Heber hired me, the firewall had been broken.

_It was shredded, actually. By myself and my– another specialist, a consultant who was not beholden to the Corporation. He managed to… to interface with the cybernetic augmentations of my body and use my own connection to the Virtu to shatter its programming. The Mirador’s specialists have not yet managed to repair it._

But we’re working on it.

… _Yes. We are_.

That’s a story for a different time, though.

*

I told Mavortian von Heber where he could stick his job offer and he laughed. He and I and his goon in the back all knew that he pretty much had my head on a platter no matter what, since I’d been stupid enough to get caught. Or called. Or whatever von Heber thought he’d done to get me here.

But getting caught by the Mirador as a wanted data thief with a jailbreaked rig and getting caught by the Mirador attempting to kidnap Felix Harrowgate, former Mirador specialist and public enemy number one, were totally different orders of magnitude, when it came to the kind of punishment I’d get.

Von Heber probably knew that too, because after a moment, he said, “You will be compensated, of course. Handsomely.”

“Fifty thousand,” I said, doubling my going rate. “Half the money up front, and all expenses covered,” I said, and he looked surprised, like he hadn’t been expecting me to start bargaining with him then and there.

Yeah, well, I ain’t stupid. I know a scam when I see one. And I still could have walked away. I should have. But Ginevra was dead and this seemed the easiest way to follow her without actually ending it myself.

“Fine,” von Heber said, making me wish I’d asked for more. “Bernard, fetch his things.”

The goon in the back made a noise like he wanted his turn to tell Mavortian where to stick it, but turned to grab my rig, my kit, and my knives. When I settled the rig back over my head, I found out I’d been right about what von Heber was seeing – there were virtual screens all over the room, with camera feeds from all over and readouts and my own picture, scar and all, staring down at me. Von Heber blinked it away, and then the only extra things I saw with my rig were the soft glow the wires emitted as they snaked up von Heber’s chair, and diagnostic displays floating over them that I couldn’t read.

The ghost wasn't there. Good, I thought; maybe it had been a temporary glitch. Or maybe it had something to do with von Heber’s “calling” and quantum computing and what not. As long as it didn’t come back, I didn’t much care.

“Luckily for all of us, Felix Harrowgate is not currently being held within the Mirador headquarters,” von Heber went on, moving his eyes a little ways to the side and pulling up a large VR screen that hung between all three of us, me and him and Bernard. “Due to ongoing… psychological instability, he has been transferred to Saint Crellifer’s Hospital.”

I whistled low under my breath. Crellifers ran on a totally private network, which meant it showed up in Melusine like a black void. A black void full of stories and, they said, ghosts, because even the most private networks had some leaks here and there. Getting in there would be better than getting into Mirador headquarters, but not by much. And getting a madman out of there?

I didn’t like at all where this was going.

Von Heber pulled up video feed of Crellifers, the physical building anyway, and then blinked away the outside of the building, so that we were left watching a glowing, three-dimensional floorplan.

“When you get into the building, you will pant a data spike that will allow me access to its private network. Then, I’ll be able to feed you the floor plan, obfuscate the surveillance systems, and determine where Felix Harrowgate is being kept.”

I didn’t know what ‘obfuscate’ meant, but I got the gist. “Sure. I’m the only one going? No security?” I nodded at Bernard, who was glaring at the VR screen the same way he’d been glaring at me.

“Bernard has a large and varied skill set, but he is decidedly not a thief,” von Heber said, which was probably nicer than him saying that he actually cared whether Bernard lived or died and couldn’t say the same about me. Well, nicer for me; Bernard looked like he was sucking lemons.

“And we’re gonna do this now?”

“Excuse me?”

“Now?” I repeated, gesturing to the VR screen and making an effort not to swallow my words. “Today?”

Von Heber actually laughed. I liked that even less than his smile. “Goodness, no, not _now_. I wasn’t sure what or who would show up at my door, except that it would be something to help me get into Saint Crellifer’s. The data spike will be delivered to your address in three days time with further instructions. Until then, you’re free to go.”

Von Heber was going to let me out of his grasp for three whole days? Without thinking, I glanced over at Bernard, who smirked. “Don’t try anything,” he said, and I could tell he’d been waiting this whole time to threaten me, and would love to make good on those threats.

They knew who I was. They’d had my rig in their possession for a while. And von Heber had probably tagged me somehow while I was in his sanctum. I _could_ make a run for it. But getting rid of all the tracers they’d put on me would take a bit longer than three days, and anyway I wasn’t sure whether it was worth it. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and no other jobs waiting.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Okay. Three days.”

Von Heber gave that thin little smile again. “Wonderful. You will find that twenty-five thousand dollars have been wired to your account, Mildmay. I am looking forward to doing business with you.”

“Yeah,” I repeated. “Thanks.”

“Bernard?” Von Heber turned his attention to the goon. “Escort Mildmay wherever he wishes to go.”

*

I had Bernard drop me off five blocks from my room. He knew it was pointless and so did I, but old habits die hard and I didn’t want him to actually see me going in through the door. He did it, though; he was as happy to get me out of the car as I was to be on my way.

I’d stowed my rig in my bag along with my kit, and I kept it there while I walked the remainder of the way. With a rig on or with the augmentations that were getting more and more popular these days, the neon lit advertisements lining the road would have been alive with color and noise. Ginevra’d always thought they were cheerful. They just made me tired.

I was staying in a shit tenement on account of how city sec – not Mirador Cybersecurity, just the usual kind – had raided my apartment a couple of months ago and sent me into hiding. Since I couldn’t take a job besides petty thievery or low stakes poker in Mélusine, I was stuck in one of the many run-down apartment buildings, formerly public housing, that lined this part of the city, paying cheap rent to some squatter who had claimed the good blocks first to landlord it over everyone else. At least I had enough money for now to make sure my room had four _real_ walls, and a door with a lock.

It’s the little things.

I stayed quiet heading into the tenement, seeing as it was past 0300, and made it into my room without waking the family of four that sleeps in the big room just outside it. The door was still locked and, when I got out my rig, my security system told me that no one had been in here since I left.

Good.

I pulled out the locked box I kept shoved in the back of an empty closet, entered my code, and then got out the full VR headset. I snapped in my rig, made sure the batteries were fully charged, then entered Mélusine.

Depending on where you’re coming from and what you want to do, you can choose where you wind up. Flats and flashies come through the main gates or, occasionally, via the Mirador spire. There are other entrances, though, like the ones in the Arcane, Mélusine’s digital shadow. Some are private, some are public-with-a-fee, and others are free for all but secret. I liked coming up through a gate in Havelock that got me into one of the research hubs, always full of students and scientists arguing about some paper or another, or fighting over scraps of intellectual property like dogs worrying a bone. It was always packed, and I could pass unnoticed through the crowd as I made my way deeper into the information district.

There was someone keeping pace next to me. I tensed, real muscles flexing as if I was getting into some kind of fight, but I already knew who it would be.

“So you ain’t just Mavortian’s pet,” I muttered, wondering if the ghost would respond. "Or he set you following me?"

It was staring straight ahead with its yellow eye. I couldn’t see the spook eye on the other side of its face. But otherwise it looked the same, still soft around the edges with that choppy red hair and familiar features I couldn’t place. It was taller than me by a good half a foot.

I thought it was going to ignore me, but after a few seconds, a blinking cursor appeared on my feed. Mostly people in Mélusine had their rigs set so that it sounded like we were all talking out loud to each other, even when folks were actually typing. But I guess ghosts don’t do that.

_What is Mavortian?_

I snorted. “Great question. That’s what we’re gonna go find out.”

_There are many people._

“Ain’t you ever been through Mélusine before?”

Another long pause. _Yes. I must have_.

I glanced over at the ghost but it looked even fuzzier around the edges now – frozen in my peripheral like a glitching video feed. Pausing for a moment, I checked my A/V settings. They were normal but I refreshed my feed anyway, like I had a bad connection, and when I looked around again, the ghost was gone.

I saw it two more times on the way to Cardenio’s, though. Once, staring at me through the window of a cafe, surrounded by couples going on their online dates. And once, looking so fuzzy it was nearly translucent, on the bridge over the Sim (“Simulation River,” get it?), staring out over the water and looking very, very afraid.

*

“Mavortian von Heber?” Cardenio repeated when I’d given him my employer’s name. “I don’t know him.”

I’d weaseled Cardenio out of the skimmers’ nest to walk with me along the edge of the Sim. The river changes depending on the season, the hour, the volume of people in Mélusine. Now that the Virtu was broken, it seemed more darker and more sluggish than before, less like an actual river and more like a... I don’t know what. Something you’d see in a horror flick when you know something real bad is about to happen. A bad dream.

Both of us tried not to look at it too much while we walked. Least it meant that we were pretty much on our own for this conversation, since everyone else seemed to be giving the water a wide berth, too. I thought about the ghost that I’d left on the bridge, but I hadn’t seen it when I’d come back out with Cardenio.

“He might be a private broker,” Cardenio continued, saying the words with distaste. Skimmers had no truck with people who charged boatloads of real money for the stuff you could learn in Mélusine. But the skimmers knew pretty much everything, so they could afford to be snotty about other brokers in the area. “But if he is, he’s new. Even my master hadn’t heard of him.”

That wasn’t great to hear. I’d been hoping to get some idea of what I was dealing with, but all I'd learned was what I had already known: it was too much for me to handle. I sighed.

Cardenio glanced sidelong at me. “What’s up?” he asked instead of wanting to know why I was asking about some broker nobody had ever heard of. I’d always appreciated that about him – the way he never chased too far after my secrets.

“Nothing,” I said, and he let me get away with the lie. “How’s journeyman treating you?”

Cardenio’s face lit up and for the rest of the walk, he told me stories about his assignments and the other journeyman skimmers and the teacher he adored. He was good at telling stories and always careful to change tells like names and dates and places, and I was good at listening and pretending I didn’t know any of the people he was talking about even when sometimes I did.

I felt better after our talk, like always, and I was glad Cardenio’d forgiven me for cussing him out after Ginevra died. And then I was thinking about Ginevra again, so I shoved that aside and out of the way because I didn’t want to dwell on it now.

“Same time next month?” Cardenio asked when we came to a stop again in front of the skimmers’ nest.

“Yeah,” I said, but then I thought about how in three days I’d be breaking into Crellifers to kidnap Felix Harrowgate, and said, “Cardenio, if things get weird around here in a bit… don’t come looking for me. Okay?”

His eyes widened – that was the kid I’d known – and then narrowed: that was the journeyman skimmer. “What kind of weird?” he asked. “Is there anything we should do to prepare?”

I shook my head once, quick. “My kind of trouble. Not yours. But don’t worry, okay?”

Cardenio reached out to take one of my hands. Our personal VR displays passed through each other – in Mélusine, you can’t touch unless you’ve got a rig for that, and most people with haptics are flash or turning tricks in places like Pharaohlight or both. I appreciated the gesture, though, and held out my hand, palm up.

Cardenio put his hand palm down just on top of mine, not so close that the graphics got messy. “Be safe, Mildmay.”

“I always am,” I lied, and he smiled and blushed all the way to his ears.

I was halfway back to Havelock when I realized I had forgotten to ask him about the ghost.

*

The next day, late in the afternoon, I went to scout out Crellifers. It took a while to get there, seeing how it was all the way in the medical district and I didn’t want to take any kind of transport to get there. I had a few identities I was pretty sure hadn’t been compromised, but I didn’t want to risk city sec tagging my rig, or getting my scar on their facial recognition software. So I walked.

Crellifers is a real ugly building, six stories tall but still looking like a toad squatting over the side of the road. It’s got high walls in the front that surround some kind of garden for the inmates – residents, maybe I should say, but as far as I can tell they were basically prisoners – but the building backed onto a slimy alleyway full of dumpsters with a few promising service entrances. And plenty of security cameras, which I nearly found out the hard way when my rig highlighted a moving one that was about to look right at me.

I moved out of its way quick, and only stopped to slap a motion-activated blister cam on the opposite wall from the door before I got out of there entirely. Blister cams weren’t cheap and I’d lost most of them with the surprise raid on my flat, but von Heber’d promised to cover expenses and he could pay for this too.

The problem with the medical district, at least from my point of view, is that it’s one of the best secured districts in the city – both the meat city and Mélusine. Hack doctors don’t want anyone coming in and jacking their augment technology or their patient files; their bosses want to keep track of who’s going where in the district to make sure only the right folks come in. Seeing as I wasn’t flash and I wasn’t currently bleeding or coughing myself to death, I wasn’t the right folks. Once I synced my blister cam through a VPN and then into my rig, I was out of there.

I found my way to an underground dive bar about halfway between the medical district and the tenement block. It wasn’t anywhere I frequented, so I was pretty sure no one had beef with me, and as soon as I got my drink I headed to the back corner booth. It was walled off on three sides by opaque glass, the kind that’ll show you vids if you put in a little money. Right now it was dark and I caught a glimpse of my own reflection looking back at me, scar and all.

I don’t like looking at myself on the best days, and since Ginevra died – well. There hadn’t really been a day I could even call good.

I kept my rig on, pulled my hood over my head, and slouched down, flicking through the blister cam feed. There had been no sign of motion in the alleyway so far, except for two rats running into one of the overfull dumpsters. Well, I’d keep the blister cam running a couple of days, but I figured it would only prove what I already knew, that the alley and that back door would be my point of entry.

My beer wasn’t done and I didn’t want to just leave it, so I tabbed through the rest of my feeds as I sipped – messages (none), news (nothing good), job listings (nothing I could take). I was figuring I’d use the glass booth for its intended purpose and watch something to kill the time when I looked up again at my reflection and saw the ghost.

It was sitting right next to me, so that our faces showed up together in the opaque glass: mine scarred, dyed black hair with red roots showing through. His with that spook eye and chopped up red hair. It was like looking at a drawing of the same person done by two different artists.

More than a little spooked, I look to my left, where the ghost seemed like he was sitting. There was no one there, of course, and no one next to my reflection when I lifted the AR rig a little.

 _Hello_ , the ghost said, the text scrolling over his head along the glass. _You are wound about by grief and thorns_.

“What?” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

 _Would you like to see?_ the ghost asked. And before I could say yes or no, my AR feed went dark. At first I couldn’t see anything, and I was about taking it off when the low red infravision display kicked on, glitching out here and there like the whole rig was dealing with serious feedback. Across from me, I saw the ghost – my ghost. And next to it was a man with a fox’s head, wrapped all around with barbed wire.

The fox-man was crying.

“What the _hell_ ,” I spat and pulled off my rig, shaking my head to clear it.

I’d never been happy to see my own reflection before, but now it felt like an old friend when I looked across the booth at the dark glass and met my eyes and nobody else’s.

It took me a while to put my rig back on, and by the time I’d worked up the strength, the ghost was gone.

*

As promised, the data spike and an info disc were delivered to my room three days after my meeting with von Heber.

If von Heber wasn’t a real information broker, he should have been, because the amount of data he’d gotten on Crellifers was enough to make my eyes water. He’d organized it into folders too, lined up alphabetically on the VR display: _blueprints_ , _personnel_ , _residents_ , _target_.

I selected blueprints first. I’d already figured out a couple of points of entry into Crellifers; the blueprints helped me narrow it down to one entrance (with a backup just in case) and three possible exits, depending on how things went down inside. One of those exits was onto the roof. That was in case everything went real pear-shaped and I needed to get out real fast.

I skimmed through the personnel folder next. Crellifers was run by some sort of pseudo-religious order, and you could see the devotion in these guys’ faces. Devotion to what, I didn’t know, but I was betting they were about as crazy as their patients, and maybe more so.

I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the files on the patients. It felt like a skeevy thing to do, and I knew people who knew people who had ended up in Crellifers. I didn’t want to see Esteban’s mother or Jean-Claude’s second cousin or Estella’s old neighbor, the one who used to sit at her window all day and all night so you could see her staring wherever you were on the street.

I opened the target folder next, and I nearly dropped the disc, because I was standing face to face with my ghost.

 _Felix Harrowgate_ , said the scrolling text at the bottom of the headshot. _Age 26. Height 6’2”. Weight 152 lbs._

I looked at the headshot again, and tried to actually look at Felix Harrowgate. His red hair was long here, braided back loosely, and he looked proudly at the camera with his skew eyes. One was yellow, like it had showed up in my AR display. The other was blue and milky and not filled with staticky code. It was an augment, though, not his original eye. You can always tell.

I flicked through the rest of the information. For a guy who’d been one of the top specialists at Mirador Corp, there wasn’t much about his life or his career, and only a little about his condition: _Patient appears deeply delusional. Augmentations do not respond to network stimuli. Further research needed_.

There were some other pictures of him too – one taken after he’d gotten to Crellifers, I think, with his hair chopped off and standing up all funny and his skew eyes staring right through the camera like he doesn’t even know it exists. There was a full body scan too, which I flipped through quick just to give him some privacy. But all of his augs showed up in bright colors you couldn’t ignore: his eye, his brain stem, his spine, his hands and wrists, the small of his back.

I didn’t like augs that much. Don’t like thinking that Mirador Corp and all the other suppliers could have a direct line into my body whenever they want. And out of all the people I know who got them, maybe a third were actually willing.

Thinking about that made me wonder if Felix had been willing. I thought about the ghost, the way its augment eye spilled out black and white static like blood.

Then I shut the file, feeling my stomach roll over. This was a bad idea. But I was in too far to back out.

After uploading the blueprints to my rig, I disposed of the disc and sent von Heber a message: _Ready when you are._

*

Getting into Crellifers was easier than expected. It made sense, kind of. Who wants to break into a blackboxed madhouse? All their defenses were pointing in to keep patients – inmates – from getting _out_.

I came in through the service door I’d scoped out the other day. My full rig was equipped with a scrambler that would fuzz up the cameras for a minute or so, but it wouldn’t work much longer than that, so the first priority was to find a port for von Heber’s data spike.

According to the blueprints I’d gotten, the service entry led to a maintenance corridor. I toggled the overlay on my rig, and the wayfinder I’d set up last night painted a glowing arrow at one of the network nodes, safe within a metal cabinet against the wall.

The lock took about a second to pick, but I opened the door carefully in case of alarms. A few seconds later, I was jimmying the data spike into an open port. This was where things could go real bad. If von Heber wasn’t as good a hacker as he thought he was, or if Crellifers’ firewalls were better than we expected, we’d lose our chance to get to Felix.

A red light turned on and began to blink, slowly and then faster.

I held my breath.

The light turned green, and all of a sudden a flood of information washed into my VR display – camera feeds, network activity, even the biofeedback from the tracking monitors attached to each patient’s ankle.

I’d have to take care of that when I got to Felix.

Von Heber’s voice also crackled to life in my ear, sounding as crisp and clear as if we were standing in the same room again. This was a good dataspike. “Well, that was interesting. It would have been more convenient if you had used the spike closer to the server control room.”

“Convenient for you, maybe,” I muttered, not caring whether the subvocal mic sent that on to von Heber or not. He might have been sitting pretty with all the data in the world at his fingertips, but this was my game.

I shut the cabinet door, but didn’t lock it. If I was lucky enough to come out this way, I’d take the spike with me; if not, von Heber’d told me it couldn’t be traced and, seeing as it was his neck on the line for _that_ one, I figured it’d be fine.

It felt weird, watching the camera feed of the corridor I was in show up empty. I watched it for a few seconds, making sure no one was approaching. I was just about to start walking when it glitched and flickered, and then Felix was standing there in front of me.

No. It was the ghost. It showed up on the VR screen with that staticky fuzz around its edges, and there was no matching shape in the camera feed. Now we were both ghosts, staring at each other in a corridor that showed up empty on every screen.

He was blocking my way. I took a hesitant step forward and watched him move back, keeping the exact same distance between us. I wondered if he knew where I was. Where he was. That I was coming to get him. Had that been why he’d started hanging around?

Knowing the ghost in my rig was Felix Harrowgate changed everything and nothing at the same time. I started moving faster down the corridor, but with the ghost watching me, I kept thinking about what would happen after, when von Heber got his hands on Felix and I was back out on the streets.

Felix flickered out when I moved out of the corridor and into a flight of stairs. I couldn’t stop myself any longer, so I opened the channel again.

“You there?”

“Mildmay.” The connection was good, and von Heber’s voice sounded as crisp and close as it had when I’d been standing in the room with him. “What is it?”

I asked before I could think better of it. “What d’you want Felix for?”

There was a long pause and I imagined him exchanging a look with Bernard, saying with a glance _who does this jumped up datajacker think he is_? My job was to do my job and not ask questions, and he knew that and I knew that. My job was to not care about Felix Harrowgate, or his fucked up ghost, or the way looking at him felt like looking into a wonky mirror or a sim of myself that got stretched and squeezed.

“I am interested,” von Heber said after a long moment, “in the methods Felix Harrowgate used to shred the firewalls of the Virtu. From what I have been able to uncover, it seems remarkably similar to the methods of a man I used to know.” There was another long pause, and I’d almost started asking another question when von Heber continued. “The man who crippled me.”

“You think Felix who did that?” I asked. I wouldn’t have disbelieved him about Felix’s capabilities, but it seemed too neat to be true.

“Of course not,” von Heber said like I was stupid for asking questions that made sense. “But I think Felix can lead me to him.”

“Oh.” I thought about that for a second, thought through some more obvious questions like _why didn’t you just go through the Mirador_ and _don’t you care about having the entire corp on your tail_? But I knew those weren’t questions von Heber would want to answer and I didn’t think he could. I could recognize obsession when I saw it. Anyway, I didn’t think that he was going to kill Felix right away, so I figured the job was still okay.

And having fifty grand wouldn’t hurt if I had to do something _really_ stupid, like I was kind of thinking I might.

“Is your conscience assuaged?” von Heber asked, all snarky. “Can you continue with your job?”

I didn’t like his tone much, but there’s a time to have arguments about how your employer talks to you and that time isn’t when you’re sneaking down through the women’s permanent residency wing in a private psych ward. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going.”

*

Felix was staying all the way on the sixth floor, which had a bunch of high-security individual rooms. A lot of them were empty, at least according to the files von Heber had gotten for me, which was good, because they seemed nasty – soundproof walls, high, barred windows, furniture bolted down so you couldn't throw it. I tried not to think about that as I hurried down the corridor and to Felix’s room, way at the end of the hall.

“Here,” von Heber said as I reached room 64. “This is his room.” I’d gotten that impression too, seeing how I'd just seen Felix’s ghost walk right through the door. “I will unlock it for you.”

I stood there for a few seconds, glancing at the cameras on either side of the hallway and hoping von Heber's hacking was as good as he’d said, before the electronic lock on Felix’s door clicked green.

I put a gloved hand on the knob, then stopped. “You know what he's doing in there?” The furniture was bolted down, sure, but I didn't want to get attacked as soon as I walked in.

After a pause, von Heber said, “He is sitting on his bed.”

It didn’t make me feel great, knowing they had cameras in Felix’s room, too. But it wasn’t surprising. I opened the door and went in.

Felix was sitting on his bed, head down, like von Heber had said, and the ghost was standing right next to him. It was like seeing double, and I blinked a couple times, in case my rig was glitching out. Felix didn’t react to my walking in, but the ghost gave a small bow, spreading its hands. _Welcome_.

“Did you want me here the whole time?” I asked with a frown.

“What was that, Mildmay?” von Heber asked, but I ignored him, staring at the ghost. It was giving me a considering look, like it had never thought of the question, and going a little fuzzy around the edges.

 _No_ , the ghost typed. _I don't know_.

“Alright,” I said, and stepped past it to the edge of the bed, looking over the meat Felix. His hair was even worse in person, and he had an ankle monitor attached to his legs. There were bracelets on each of his hands, too – like hospital bracelets, kind of, but silvery. “Von Heber?”

“These devices are shackling his augmentations,” von Heber explained in my ear. “Locking him out of the ‘net. I can fix that when he comes here. Probably.” That was the first time I’d ever heard von Heber sound like he doubted his ability to get something done, even though I was pretty certain it wasn't the first time he'd bullshitted to me. I kept that in mind, but there was nothing we could do about it now.

“The ankle?”

“Yes, give me a moment.”

As von Heber worked on that, I stepped a little bit closer to Felix. The ghost was watching me, but Felix himself didn't seem to register my presence. “Felix,” I said. There was no response. “ _Felix_.”

 _Hello_ , the ghost said, and as its letters drifted into my field of vision I looked up at it. I didn't want to talk to the ghost. I wanted to talk to Felix, and I wondered whether the ghost _was_ Felix, in some weird quantum computing way that maybe von Heber would understand, or if the ghost was an actual ghost. The shade of Felix as a person, or something like that, uploaded to the 'net. Maybe it had something to do with the shackles.

But that was all specialist stuff, and I may be smart in my own way, but I’m a thief. I don’t make programs, and I don’t deal with ghosts. Well. I didn’t used to deal with ghosts. I turned back to meatspace Felix and reached out to touch him on the shoulder.

 _Don’t touch_ , wrote the ghost, and I looked at it. _I don’t like being touched_.

“You’re Felix?” I said.

“Mildmay, what is going on?” von Heber asked.

I muted my mic. Von Heber wasn’t here to see this, and even if he was, I was already thinking Felix was more important. “Listen.” I turned to the ghost. “I’m here to get you out. But you’re bigger than me, and I can’t do it if he,” I pointed to meatspace Felix on the bed, “can’t get up and walk.” Or I could, but it would involve a lot of dragging and wouldn’t be fun for anybody. Especially for me, once I got caught.

The ghost took a few seconds to figure that one out. Then it frowned. _We are leaving this place?_ it said. And then, _You’re real_?

Well, that didn’t make me feel great, on account of how I’d been kind of banking on Felix being lucid enough to follow me out of here. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Mildmay.”

 _My name is Felix Harrowgate_ , the ghost said.

“Yeah,” I said. “And that’s your body. And you need to go back in there and wake him up.”

The ghost didn’t look happy about that. _Mirador security protocol is interfering with the function of my augmentations. When I am awake – I am not – the modifications are quite extensive_.

“Can you walk?”

There was a long silence while the ghost stared at its body. I wondered what it was seeing. Could it see? How was Felix Harrowgate walking around like this when he was also shacked in Crellifers black box? I wondered if this had something to do with breaking the Virtu. I didn’t think I really wanted the answer. _Yes_ , the ghost typed after a moment.

“Okay,” I said. “Because we’ve gotta walk out of here. And you’ve gotta do it with me. And you can’t do it as a ghost because then we’ll never get him,” I jerked my thumb at meatspace Felix, “out of here.”

 _I understand_ , the ghost said. But then a few seconds passed and without anything happening, except it got kind of fuzzy around the edges.

“Felix?”

 _I do not particularly want to go back_.

I could sympathize with that, kind of. But we had bigger problems. “Well, you have to, if you want out of here,” I said. Von Heber may have bugged the cameras to wipe my image, but odds were the staff would notice something was up, if they didn’t realize it already. And the longer we waited here, the less room for error we had.

The ghost looked like it wanted to argue. Or like it wanted to cuss me out. But it went fuzzy again, glitching out and then disappearing altogether, and at that same moment, Felix moved on the bed and looked up. Even without that staticky glitch, his eyes were spooky – the yellow one peering at me, ready to flinch back, and the blue augment sitting dead in its socket. His fingers twitched like he was typing, and then he opened his mouth. It looked like it took real effort to get the words out. “You… are Mildmay.”

His voice sounded different than I thought it would, though I don’t know what I was expecting since he’d only typed at me before. It was a little higher-pitched. Faint, almost.

“That’s me,” I said and switched on my mic again. “Von Heber?”

“Mildmay, _stop_ turning off our communication,” von Heber said, exasperated. Okay. He was still there. And still annoying as hell, but some things would never change.

“Figured out how to deal with the ankle monitor?”

As I spoke, there was a beep and the green light on the monitor started to flash red. “Take it off now,” von Heber said and I did, careful not to touch Felix. He kept his foot very still, and soon it was on the ground. “I’ve set up a short term dummy program that will loop Felix’s vital signs, but it won’t hold up under scrutiny. I suggest you leave with haste.”

“I hear you,” I muttered and looked at Felix, who was looking at me. “Okay,” I told him. “Stand up.”

There was a second where he went fuzzy around the edges, like his ghost was trying to stand up out of him, but I watched him gather himself together and get shakily to his feet. The movement looked like it cost him, and I glanced away while he took a few baby steps, figuring I’d give him whatever privacy I could.

When I looked back, he was upright and holding himself together, and though voice was shaky his gaze was firm as he said, “I’m ready.”

"Well then," von Heber chimed in on my earpiece, and I could tell he was barely holding back his impatience. "I believe it's time to make our escape." 

*

When everything was said and done, it was actually pretty easy to get Felix out of his room. It was less easy to get out of Crellifers.

We ended up on the roof. Ever since I’d pinned an exit there, I’d sort of got the feeling it was bound to happen, and with meatspace Felix still looking like he was seeing ghosts everywhere he went, and not actually seeing anything that happened to be right in front of him, I figured it was better to get as far away as possible from anyone who might be watching.

On the other hand, that meant we were up there on the roof of a six story building with the wind in our hair and Felix’s feet shoved into cheap cloth slippers I’d found unused in his closet.

“We’re gonna do the fire escape,” I said. I could’ve shimmied my way down the building but there was no way Felix would have been able to come with me, and I wasn’t hopeful about the fire escape either, but it was better than nothing. “Okay?” I gestured to the fire escape. “Felix, okay?”

He didn’t respond. Didn’t even look like he’d heard what I’d been saying, and I got the feeling that I could have shouted myself raw and still not reached him.

“Tell him to run a systems check,” von Heber said in my earpiece, as if we weren’t both about to fall off a roof because Felix was too busy seeing ghosts to think about where he was putting his feet.

“Felix,” I said again, getting into his face. “Run a systems check.”

Felix blinked, then looked at me, then blinked again, his gaze going distant. But I could see a blue light blinking in his augmented eye, and his wired hands started to move and twitch, and I figured that’s what it looked like when you ran a systems check on augs, not that I’d know.

So I left him to it and went to scope out the fire escape. It was in the back of the building, where Crellifers borders on a squalid alley and butts up against another building, and it wanted replacing, but I figured it would hold our combined weight. And if it didn’t, I figure we’d be past the point of caring, so there was that, too.

Felix seemed a little more with it by the time I was done checking. At least, he was looking at me and not through me, so I figured that was a good sign.

“Hey,” I said. “We’re going down the fire escape and getting out of here. Okay?”

His eyes slid to the fire escape and I was worried I’d lost him again, but then he said, “Are you certain it will hold us?” He talked all slow and precise and his voice was higher-pitched than I had expected.

“Nah,” I said. “But it’s that or climb down the walls.”

He looked back at the roof door, but I could see in his face that there was no question about going back into Crellifers, and after a moment he walked toward the fire escape anyway. I got onto it first, figuring I had a better chance to throw myself to safety if a step gave out below me, and he followed, walking like every bone in his body was aching.

Maybe they were. I don’t know what Mirador or the Virtu or Crellifers had done to him, and I kind of didn’t want to know, either. There’s only so much nastiness you can hold at one time.

But we reached the bottom of the fire escape without incident, and I helped Felix lower himself down onto solid ground before jumping after him. I must’ve grunted a bit when I landed because next thing I knew, von Heber was saying all impatient, “Are you down yet? And out?”

“In the alley,” I said, straightening up and glancing at Felix again. He was looking at the street beyond with a nervous expression, and I couldn’t blame him one bit. “You’ve got a car coming for us?”

“Bernard is waiting at the pickup site.”

“Right,” I said, and switched off my mic. “Felix.”

He looked at me again. “Yes?” His voice had gone dreamy again but I wasn’t seeing double in my VR screen, so I figured he was okay for now. He wasn’t a ghost yet.

“I gotta ask you one thing, and then I gotta tell you one thing. Okay?”

He raised his eyebrows at that, and I got a sense of the kind of person he must have been when he was at the top of the Mirador food chain, not the bottom. But that faded just as quick as it had appeared, and he just gave me a quiet, “Yes.”

I’d had this suspicion kind of growing for a while, and I wanted to get it out when Felix and I were alone, so I didn’t have von Heber or Bernard breathing down my neck as we figured this out. “Your mother’s name. Was it Methony?”

He looked at me like that was the last question he’d expected, which was maybe fair, but then he nodded real slow. “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said, and did my best to fit that knowledge into place in my head without knocking something else out. I’d already been making space for it but it was still too big to take in all at once. “Okay.” I took a breath. “I think we’re brothers. Half-brothers.”

Felix looked at me, actually looked at me, his skew eyes boring into mine. I wondered what he was seeing through his augmented eye, what kinds of things it was telling him about me. Or, if the Mirador had really locked him out of the ‘net, I wondered what else he was looking for. “Oh,” he said after a moment, his voice a little higher-pitched than before. “That makes sense.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Maybe it didn’t mean much to him, but it meant something to me. I wasn’t sure what yet, seeing as I grew up on my own since my mother gave me up, but I figured I wanted to hold onto any family I had. And I figured maybe Felix felt the same, since his ghost had found me somehow and trailed me around even though he had no idea what I was doing for Mavortian von Heber.

And, deep down, I kind of got the feeling that somebody needed to be on Felix’s side, his actual side, not just thinking about all the things he could offer them, and I figured I could be that person too. I wanted to be that person, or at least I wanted to try. I wanted something to believe in.

Which led to the next thing I wanted to say. “I was hired to get you by a man named Mavortian von Heber. Heard of him?”

After a beat, he shook his head.

“Okay. He wants you to help him find some guy for him. He didn’t say he’d pay you or nothing like that, but… I’ll stick around and make sure he’s fair. But if you wanna go, we go, okay? And if you wanna go now, I can give him the slip.” It would take a real effort and would probably get pretty dicey before the end, but I’d do it. “Do you wanna go? Run?”

There was another long pause, and I could see Felix, meatspace Felix, get kind of fuzzy around the edges, like his ghost was going to peel off him and start wandering away and leave his body just standing there uselessly. And then he must have reined himself in, because I saw him blink and get more solid under my gaze. “No,” he said. “I can’t run.”

 _Can’t_ wasn’t the same as _don’t want to_ , but I had a feeling that was the best I was going to get out of Felix today. I could always ask again, later. And figure out how to disappear, just in case Felix thought von Heber was as annoying as I did.

For now, though, I just said, “Okay.” And then, because Felix was my brother and reminded me of a little kid lost in a fairy story, I held out my hand. “Ready?”

He looked at my hand, and then he looked up at me. And I don’t know where he was then or what he was thinking, but after a few seconds he lifted his own hand and placed it in mine. The augmentations made it heavy. I could almost feel the sparkles of electricity against the skin of my palm.

I ignored them, and started walking.

“Okay,” I said, leading us both onto the street and towards von Heber’s car. “Let’s go.”

*

So that’s more or less the story of how me and Felix met, and how we got in with von Heber. Course, it doesn’t cover any of the stuff that happened later, like how we met Gideon, who used to run half the black market before he got cold feet and fell in with Mirador. Or how we ended up at Troia Corp’s weird gardens and decided to fix the Virtu. Or how Mirador’s firewall kicked in and fucked up my leg for good. Or how we met Mehitabel Parr, who’s basically the most famous VR star in Mélusine, and got her in with the Mirador.

It doesn’t cover a lot of stuff, basically. I’ll have to come back and add more, but my throat hurts from talking and Felix is getting impatient.

 _I am not_.

Your leg is jiggling and everything. It’s because we’re going to go have dinner with Gideon, and Gideon and Felix are–

_Tabby is also coming._

Yeah, well. Anyway.

 _You’re blushing_.

Anyway, like I was saying, eventually I’ll come back and get the rest out so you get the full story of what we did. It ain’t a short story, though, so it might take me a while. But it’s worth telling.

_Isn’t. It isn’t a short story._

Come on. Dinner’s waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: this fic contains mentions of character death, mentions of extensive body modification, and scenes inside a psychiatric hospital. It contains canon-typical hints of dubcon, noncon, and torture, but it does not feature extensive descriptions thereof.
> 
> Thank you for the opportunity to play around with this incredibly fun AU! I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
